Big Bang Collides with Scientific Evidence

Popular media outlets delight in talking about the Big Bang as if it is a scientifically proven event that can be documented and studied. In fact, it is discussed in such matter-of-fact terms that few who read the “latest news” about the Big Bang would ever realize that not only has science never verified that it happened, but legitimate science has shown that it could not have happened (see Lyons, 2007; Thompson, et al., 2003).

A recent article posted on Yahoo! provides an excellent example of the kind of scientific misrepresentation that runs rampant in the popular media. In the article, the author Maggie Fox bases the entire thrust of the report on the assumption that the Big Bang occurred, with no scientific evidence to validate that assumption. Then she writes as if scientists know exactly what happened during the Big Bang, an event that only happened in the imaginations of the scientists. For instance, Fox noted that scientists have “created the hottest temperature ever in the lab—4 trillion degrees Celsius—hot enough to break matter down into the kind of soup that existed microseconds after the birth of the universe” (2010, emp. added).

The scientific fact here is simply that matter was heated to four trillion degrees Celsius, assuming we are able to measure heat that high. The erroneous interpretation of that fact is that this heated material can tell us something about what happened “microseconds after the birth of the Universe.” Modern science cannot tell us how the Universe came into existence, unless it assumes the Big Bang took place (even though said explosion is a scientific impossibility). It is ironic that for many years, Bishop Ussher’s biblical chronology was ridiculed because he stated that the world started precisely on Sunday, October 23rd, 4004 B.C. (“Bishop Ussher...,” n.d.), and yet Big Bang proponents insist that they know exactly what happened microseconds after the birth of the Universe. [NOTE: Ussher’s chronology is used only to show the inconsistency of Big Bang advocates, not because it is believed that his chronology is correct.]

Artist’s concept of crucial periods in the development of the Universe according to Big Bang inflationary cosmology

This latest “Big Bang” research stems from experiments done by using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York to force gold ions together. What was the multimillion-dollar RHIC designed to do? According to Steven Vigdor of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, the collider was built “to create matter at temperatures first encountered in the early universe” (as quoted in Fox, 2010). Notice again the backwards nature of this research. The collider was not designed to manifest evidence that the Big Bang occurred, but instead was designed based on the false assumption that it did, and all the “evidence” is then interpreted in a Big Bang framework.

This bias in favor of the Big Bang is clearly evident throughout Fox’s article (and most modern cosmological research). In fact, Fox matter-of-factly wrote: “Something happened in the milliseconds after the Big Bang to create an imbalance in favor of matter over anti-matter. If there had not been this disparity, matter and anti-matter would have simply reacted to create a universe of pure energy” (2010, emp. added). Fox is referring to the fact that any time lab scientists have been able to change energy into matter, that matter always appears paired with its anti-matter particle. As Williams and Hartnett explain:

Just as energy can produce matter by this quantum pair production method, so when the matter and antimatter particles come together again they annihilate one another and revert back to energy. This has profound and unwelcome implications for big-bang theory, because our universe is made of ordinary matter, not equal amounts of matter and antimatter.... Since our universe consists only of matter (as far as we can tell—though there are probably small amounts of matter/antimatter pairs associated with localized high-energy events), it is a reasonable conclusion that our universe could not have been produced by quantum pair production. This is one of those situations where the evidence refutes the paradigm but supporters of the paradigm see it only as an unsolved problem (2005, p. 126, emp. added).

When Fox says “something happened,” and “if there had not been this disparity,” what she means is that the Big Bang theory is not a scientific possibility without some unknown force or situation that would favor matter over antimatter. And since she and her fellow Big Bang enthusiasts begin by assuming that the Big Bang actually happened, the scientific evidence that precludes it as a possibility is brushed aside, and a mysterious “something” is conjured out of the cosmological magic hat to provide the Big Bang with supernatural powers that can circumvent all known natural laws.

Click image for larger picture.

Graphic representation of the alleged evolutionary origin of the Universe, from the Big Bang to the present, including the initial expansion phase, the production of matter, and galaxy formation. Courtesy of Center for European Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva, Switzerland.

With the creation of more and more particle colliders around the world, rest assured that Fox’s article will not be the last praising the Big Bang as the point of origin of our Universe. It is equally true that, due to the false assumption that the Big Bang actually occurred, those articles will be plagued with similar scientific misrepresentations, overstatements, and misinterpretations of data. What is really colliding in much of this type of research is not sub-atomic particles, but prejudiced Big Bang bias with honest scientific inquiry. The light generated from such collisions is enough to illuminate the words of Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” if the modern scientific community would simply open its eyes to the truth.

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